In the recent years, with a society which is becoming increasingly mobile, and with the ever-increasing need for communications, wireless communication services, particularly mobile or cellular phone services, have gained wide popularity. Use of a mobile phone has now become an ubiquitous part of the modern society.
Since their introduction, mobile phone handsets nowadays provide many enhancement features, which may include, e.g., a telephone number directory database, caller identification, voice activated and/or speed dialing. The enhancement features provide much more convenient and faster ways in which a call can be made.
Unfortunately, however, the conventional mobile phone handsets suffer from many shortcomings that prevent a user from taking full advantage of the enhancement features, particularly when the user has a ready access to a land-line telephone service—also referred to as a plain ordinary telephone (POT) service, e.g., through conventional wired public switched telephone network (PSTN). For example, when the mobile phone user is in an office, home or otherwise near a POT device, the mobile phone user typically prefers to use the POT service offered at much cheaper rate rather than the mobile phone service, for which the user may have to pay much higher rate. In this case, the user is typically required to juggle two different telephone devices, e.g., to obtain a telephone number from the directory in the mobile phone handset, and to use the POT device to actually dial and make a call. It is desirable to allow a user of a mobile phone handset to utilize the enhancement features of the mobile handset even when the user is making a call through the POT network.
Moreover, more recently, mobile phone handsets have become “web enabled”. That is, a user of a web enabled mobile phone handset may access the Internet, e.g., the electronic mail (e-mail) system and the world-wide web (WWW) through a wireless communication network, using in particular the wireless application protocol (WAP). However, because of the size and/or weight constraint, the mobile phone handsets do not offer a convenient and practical user interface. It would thus be desirable to provide a better user interface means when a user is accessing the Internet through a mobile phone handset.
Furthermore, it would be desirable to provide a mobile telephone handset a capability to connect to various devices, e.g., a global positioning system device, computing devices (e.g., personal digital assistants (PDA), personal computers or the like), and even to a local area network, which may provide a more cost effective access to the Internet than the wireless communication network.
Thus, there is a need for a mobile phone handset capable of being utilized over a plain ordinary telephone line, and which is capable of communicating with various computing devices and networks.